LA CREME DE LA CREME - EP 10

Welcome to the tenth edition of La Crème de la Crème!

Let’s start with the audio bit - the bonbon 🍬

You know the deal by now: every month I record a short audio to share what’s going on behind the scenes, what triggered some of the ideas, what made me rant, and what I kept out of the written version.

This month’s one is about why I’m moving away from LinkedIn Newsletter and how the Unified Commerce Illusion project came together.

Scroll down for the rest of the newsletter

Fiserv’s free fall has excited the whole payments planet and unleashed the usual circus of commentators. “Legacy dinosaurs.” “Outdated models.” Easy takes, really.

Especially coming from people who, let’s be honest, have all worked for or with them at some point.

In French🇫🇷, we say: arrêtez de cracher dans la soupe => stop spitting in the soup( you eat to survive.)

The irony? Just a few months ago, everyone was cheering Fiserv’s stablecoin initiatives. Now, the same people call them relics. Double standards much?

Meanwhile, Klarna’s ride after its $45 IPO looks… turbulent, down to –17%. Mr Siemiatkowski is now doing A/S service to sell the idea of a neobank, like Revolut. Isn’t it a bit late to pivot?

Traditional bankers must be popping champagne right now. They always said BNPL wasn’t sustainable. Turns out, they might have been right.

My LinkedIn activity slowed down a lot lately; blame it on the prep work for the Unified Commerce Illusion. Still, I managed to post two pieces I think deserved better than the views the algorithm gave them. 😅

This one echoed my blog article (click here). I looked at how global payment providers operate in China, not for the domestic market (it’s a fortress), but to capture Chinese retailers tempted by overseas expansion. Like HeyTea, for instance…

Last week, I introduced my new long-term project on LinkedIn: The Unified Commerce Illusion. I’m launching it to give a bit of conceptual backbone to survive the coming storm of my own content. LOL.

More coming right after👇 . And no, I don’t feel I’m repeating myself, because you didn’t read the post anyway.

I was gatekept. Only 202 impressions, lost in the ocean of “Money20/20 Vegas, I was there ✨” posts.

💭 Not my most viral month, but maybe my most coherent one. Move out to the sip of the Month !

This month marks the start of something new: a long-term exploration of how the unified commerce promise was reshaped by the payments industry into yet another mechanism for control and extraction.

Relationship of powers? Of Course! 

Spill the tea on Payment is here for that purpose. To debunk, check the narratives, and help anchor in the reality of a market. Clarity, Alignment, and Right Execution. 

Across the next months, I’ll unpack how this illusion works,  how payment providers have rebranded complexity as progress, and how retailers can reclaim autonomy from that logic.

Everyone talks about unified commerce. Almost no one defines it.

It’s treated as a tech problem: APIs, integration, BOPIS, when it’s really a governance problem. Who sets the rules? Who owns the data? Who captures the margin?

The numbers speak for themselves:

Yet the industry keeps pushing for more integration, more dependency, more lock-in.

The real question isn’t how to build stickier systems, it’s how to give retailers the keys to escape them.

That’s what my new framework aims to do.

Not a miracle method promising +30 % revenue, but a way to think differently to see retail payments with fresh eyes

My whole career has lived at that intersection (Payments & Retail), from small shops to global marketplaces, and I still love it. So let’s dive in again, with curiosity instead of buzzwords.

👉 This week, I released the first essay that kicks off this project: “Retail Is in Crisis: and Payments Took Advantage of It.”

Moving La Crème de la Crème off LinkedIn is a revolution for me. I created this format 10 months ago — tenth edition. You know the story; I told it already previously here.

But now is the time to build a new home, away from the LinkedIn newsletter system.

On Spill the Tea on Payment, I often talk about sovereignty, ownership, and even accountability. This change is exactly about that

Trying to regain a bit of my own autonomy.

At first, I was afraid some people wouldn’t follow me to the new platform. But then I told myself: those who are genuinely interested will come with me.

For years, content platforms like LinkedIn have told creators and analysts the same thing:

“Build your audience here.”

But the truth is: audiences built there don’t belong to you. They belong to the feed and the algorithm.

You can’t reach them when you need to, you can’t see what they read, and you can’t even trust the algorithm to let your work exist in their timeline.

I don’t work for that. That’s not a home, that’s a hotel room with surveillance cameras I rent for my activity.

This move to Beehiiv is about more than distribution. It’s about creating space for long-term conversation with people who want substance, not memes or motivational fluff.

My blog already does that. But now, the newsletter becomes a full surface for new ideas to emerge.

It’s about respecting the readers who stay, not chasing vanity metrics or FOMO.

And it’s also the right environment for what’s coming next: the Unified Commerce Illusion arc. Because the topic itself, how payment structures quietly reshape power in retail, is about governance and control.

So yes, this move mirrors that same logic: reclaiming structure, visibility, and autonomy.

No, this isn’t just a “newsletter migration.” It’s a strong statement and a big dive for me. A bit risky, I must say.

Welcome to the new home of La Crème de la Crème.

Next month, I’ll share how the first activation of The Unified Commerce Illusion was received and what questions it opened. Hopefully.

You can still drop me a line at [email protected] , I always read with interest.

See you next month! And don’t forget to sign up on Beehiiv, but only if you love me, benchmark me, copy me, or hate me: that’s fine too. 😏